Contents

Overview

TLS (Transport Layer Security) provides authentication and encryption for many network protocols, such as: POP, IMAP, SMTP, HTTP. However, it is possible to tunnel almost every TCP-based protocol through TLS using such tools as stunnel.

Generally, many TLS realizations require only server to be authenticated using signed certificate.

Tor tunnels application data through TLS connections and it is not possible to decrypt such connections by performing traditional man-in-the-middle attack. Tor also sends application data in chunks to make it harder to guess exactly how many bytes users are communicating.